ABSTRACT
The project of researching and coming to understand environment and sustainability education and social change in higher education (also referred to as higher education for sustainable development, HESD) is deeply intertwined with coming to not only understand, but also to deepen democracy, social justice and human emancipation. This in turn, involves undertaking critical forms of research that can tease out, model and realise possible transformative acts of democracy, social justice and human emancipation in and through research. Adopting a critical research trajectory is, however, not a simple matter, as there are a range
of different critical theories that have emerged over time, and critical theory itself has undergone several generational changes. Then there is the ‘post-critical’ and discussions on critical theory lacking an adequate politics that also need to be considered, and there are recent moves in critical realist social theory that move towards developing a reconstructive social theory. These generational changes in critical theory have, and are influencing HESD research as will be discussed below. To discuss critical theory influences in HESD research it is necessary to firstly provide some
history of critical theory, to differentiate critical theory from other theories, and to consider the emergence of a critical theory research tradition in HESD research, which, as explained below, emerges via the uptake of critical research traditions in educational research and in environmental education (EE) research (a precursor to research on education for sustainable development, ESD) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While critical theory is recognised as sharing a core of philosophical concerns, it is also
recognised as being immensely diverse with individual thinkers differing substantively (Held, 1980). Despite this, critical theory has been described as having three fairly distinct ‘generations’ starting in the ‘first generation’ with the work of early Frankfurt School theorists led by Horkheimer, Marcuse and Adorno (among others) (Rush 2004; Held 1980). Later Jürgen Habermas was a key figure in the emergence of a second generation of critical theory, where he differentiated knowledge interests, and developed his theory of communicative action and deliberative democracy (Held 1980; Rush 2004). Responding to critiques of some of the
assumptions of the Habermasian theory of communicative rationality in critical theory, are a third generation of critical theorists (Axel Honneth, Seyla Benhabib and others) who are seeking to strengthen the emancipatory intentions and outcomes of critical theory via a deeper theorising of representation and deliberation, including agonistic approaches. Canaday (2003) explores how critical theory has also been deliberated within feminist critical theories, where the complex process of maintaining some commitments to universal objectives while also recognising particularity have been a key point of debate. These approaches are discussed in more detail below. Critical theory is a vast and complex arena of theorising and it is not possible to include all
of the details of this field here; these have been covered in publications such as that produced by Held (1980),McCarthy (1981), Poster (1989), and Rush (2004) among others. The focus in this chapter is on how it has been taken up in earlier forms of EE/HESD research, what can be learned from this for HESD research, and what some implications of the different generations of critical theory may be for conceptualising a critical HESD research programme or agenda today. Held (1980) and Rush (2004) provide useful overviews of the history of the genesis of the
critical research tradition, and of Horkeimer, Marcusse, Adorno, Hegel, Marx and other ‘first generation’ influences in and on the ‘Frankfurt School’. Explaining many detailed nuances in the uptake of ongoing theorising of critical theory, Rush also explains the key difference between critical theory and traditional theory as follows:
Traditional theory includes rationalist idealism and reductive materialism,wed as they are to universalistic nonhistoricism and to an instrumental concept of reason. The scientific model that it believes to have universal application across theoretical and historical boundaries, is, in fact, related to a very specific historical form of human organization – the economic form of capitalism constitutive of and expressed in bourgeois self-understanding [which some have said is a key underlying cause of sustainability issues] … Critical theory attempts to rescue from idealism a conception of reason as unified in its practical and theoretical employment, coupled with a dialectical and materialist account of human flourishing … The point upon which the rehabilitation turns is Hegel, though Hegel tempered in a Kantian way.Marx is also pivotal, but not the Marx that can be made into a form of materialism that joins hands with instrumental thought, but rather the ‘humanistic’ Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts.
